As always, taken from my book Funding Liberty available at 3mpub.com.
Chapter Eighteen
Going Through the Motions
The September-October Campaign
Throughout September, polling data continued to be less than encouraging. The September 5 Portrait of America poll found Browne down to 1.0%. A Zogby poll taken two days later put Browne at 0.3%. There was absolutely no indication that Browne would reach the 5% of the vote of which he once talked. He remained in fifth place behind the Duopoly candidates, Bush and Gore, and the respected alternative candidates, Buchanan and Nader.
The Browne Campaign ran a dispersed operation with operations in several geographic locations. The Campaign’s headquarters was near the District of Columbia. The candidate had residence in Tennessee. The primary financial reporting operation was in Tucson. This success could usefully be taken to heart by the National party. In recent years the National Party has based its efforts in the District of Columbia, either in a slum location whose safety was open to question (some would say ‘whose lack of safety was not open to question’) or the expensive Watergate building located in the immediate vicinity of sensitive government facilities likely to be subjected to foreign attack. The Browne campaign showed that political work can be dispersed to multiple sites across the USA.
Television advertising rose to 20% of the month’s income. For once, less was spent on making the ads than on running them, but ad production continued to cost 10% of campaign disbursements. The campaign spent $43,248 to run TV commercials, with purchases on September 5, 18, 21, and 27. The FEC lawsuit resurfaced on September 16, this time with the campaign collecting pledges for a future lawsuit against FEC regulations. On September 18, the Campaign reported the $20,000 TV ad purchase it actually made on that date. On September 18, the Campaign also reported that the National Party had spent $113,000 for TV ad purchases ‘as a result of fundraising done at the convention banquet’.
On September 18 LibertyWire included news from two state campaigns. The Texas report covered a wide variety of candidates. The Massachusetts report discussed only Libertarian Senatorial candidate Carla Howell (who happened to be Browne Campaign organizer Michael Cloud’s constant companion). The Party had dozens of U.S. Senate candidates. Why Howell? We come to this matter in the closing Chapters.
On September 21, the Campaign made its outreach effort to other Libertarian campaigns, offering copies of one Browne ad—the ‘battered voter’—to other Libertarian campaigns on Beta format (broadcast quality) video tape.
In September the Browne campaign did make a few efforts to mobilize its supposed volunteer base. The September 20 LibertyWire bonus issue, while mostly a response to critics who said that Browne ought to try earning news coverage, also included a list of things that volunteers could do for the Browne campaign. On September 26, the Browne Campaign invited LibertyWire subscribers to join Harry Browne’s Minutemen, a special-purpose organization tasked with lobbying the media to cover Browne’s campaign. Evidence of the scale of these efforts is difficult to determine.
What were the financial details?
